• The New York City Council, grilling police officials in September about their practice of freely seizing money from detainees under suspicion, asked for a thorough accounting of that money (suspecting that innocent victims rarely get it back unless aided by high-powered lawyers). Though (in "crime-fighting" hyperbole) NYPD routinely boasts of its half-million annual seizures, an NYPD official told the council it would be "impossible" to account for everything -- that keeping track of it all would cause its computers to crash. [Village Voice, 9-16-2016]

• The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power is bureaucratically at the epicenter of the state's drought crisis, but in September KCBS-TV aired video of the department actually using sprinklers to water the artificial lawn at a substation in South Los Angeles. A DWP spokesperson said such watering is routine at substations to "clean" the plastic (and wash off any dog urine, for example). [Reuters via msn.com, 9-18-2016]